The title of this film sounds like an advertisement for bathroom appliances.
A Buster Keaton film in which he spends half of his time being hit on the head.
This is a strange little film. Buster Keaton's character is this nobody whose job it is to hang up signs on poles and anywhere else that signs need to go. He gets hit by a car by a wealthy man after being distracted by Dorothy Christy. He's than put into a bed and told not to move because of a light concussion. In which Time Dorothy Christy volunteers to be is nurse. But the guy who hit him with a car wants to set him up to be a wealthy play-boy from over in Europe. The whole reason for this is that he's trying to marry Dorothy Christy sister who several years younger than her. But Dorothy sister won't get married until Dorothy herself does. The reason being that if her younger sister gets married everyone will see her older sister as some sort of washed out dingbat.
Winch if ask me sounds a little nonsensical. I can't imagine too many people are so shallow that they wouldn't marry a woman simply because her younger sister was already married. Also it's Dorothy Christy. She's a stunning looking woman who has a very assertive attitude.
Now a fair bit of the film in the beginning is just Reginald Denny trying to keep Buster Keaton in bed and from escaping from his house. Because he purposely hired a bunch of strange women to all pretend they were this man's mistress all coming to meet him. This overwhelms Keaton and he tries to run away, only to be smacked in the head multiple times by a broom and tackled by a group of men. Poor guy just can't catch a break.
Dorothy Christie's character is supposed to be a woman of adventurous taste. Somebody who wants a man who does strange and confusing things. Somebody that will keep her on her toes. So when she thinks that this man is a Playboy who has many women chasing after him she finds that effectuating.
Not that any of that really matters. The film has an odd Pace to it. One minute we're sitting with all the characters in a room talking with one another. It's 5 minutes after Keaton just got hit by a car and then we cut over to another scene where he's been with everybody else for a couple of weeks if not longer and he's just acting as an accountant for the girl he supposed to marry. I almost feel as if there's a half of the film we didn't even get to see.
And there's not enough character interaction. It's just a bunch of aristocrat claiming how great their husbands and or wives are and then some slapstick to follow up. This is supposed to be a romantic comedy give me long drawn-out scenes of our two main characters interacting with one another. As one tries to seduce the other and the other one pretends to be something they're not.
I like all the actors in it and I like the ''set-piece'' Which in reality is just Buster Keaton house, but the characters aren't fleshed-out very much. Everything has a very minimalistic feel to it. You can definitely tell that this was based off of a play. Because they're still very much playing this like a play. And that would be okay if I was actually at a theatre watching these people perform.
And then there's any of the external shots where it's characters running around and doing something more energetic than just sitting or interacting with a piece of the stage.
The scenes (at least in the version of the film I watched) were poorly put together. Or it's been kept poorly and somebody had to try and stick together this film using other takes. It doesn't matter,
Parts of the movie are entirely different shots done with different cameras. And the sound editing wasn't done properly either. Some of it's far more grainy and distorted than it should be.
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